Actually, to some extent I did realize this, though I couldn't resist the droll troll urge. And of course, perpetual storage isn't really any kind of end-goal itself...the 'goal' of course is to be able to securely store and move information without fear (or the possibility due to anonymity) of reprisal, if that is so desired. (As an aside, although debt has to be -forgiven- after 7 years, contrary to popular belief it is not true that a debt has to be -forgotten-...I know of one credit major card company that will not accept 'new' cardmembers that didn't pay back what they owed, even if that's 15 years ago. That's actually perfectly legal.) That said, I guess the dude does have an interesting point under all that stuff, after all. That point being that (most likely) free email capabilities may in some cases become like the now-defunct lockers in Grand Central Station...a place where "stuff" can be stored securely, and access granted at will. The key feature (as you point out) isn't so much the storage capacity (although the increasing size of such capacity makes this a more and more attractive option), but the google search feature. OK, point conceded (once I tore off the wrapper). -TD

From: "Major Variola (ret)" <mv@cdc.gov> To: "cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net" <cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net> Subject: RE: Gmail as Blacknet Date: Fri, 09 Apr 2004 10:48:02 -0700

At 09:58 AM 4/9/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote:

...

Well, I never claimed to be Einstein, but your "3 simple steps" sound a hell of a lot like my recipe for making a ham sandwich:

Hardly. One could put together a very slick "drop file here for encrypted net storage" script in a day. One could even prototype this using any net mail system like Yahoo, albeit with a rather piddling storage capacity.

By including plaintext search tokens (meaning known only to you, perhaps derived from hashing keywords) you could use Gmail's search feature to find stored data.

This uses local encryption and net-based storage & backup. Sounds good to me.

It would be rather telling if Google said "no encrypted email" wouldn't it? :-)

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